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second chanterelle season
Sunday, August 16 2026
I'd had Neville duty last night, and Neville had only waken me up once, in the early morning twilight, to go outside to piss. This strongly suggested that the switch from 20mg of prednisone to 10mg of prednisone per day had dramatically reduced the amount of water he was pulling through his system.
Once everyone was up, it was my first priority to take Charlotte for a walk. I put on a bunch of insect repellant and headed down the Chamomile Gorge Trail nearly all the way to Dug Hill Road. Then, instead of walking back (as I usually do) via the creek bed of the Chamomile itself, I climbed the slope to its south and stayed largely parallel to it as I climbed. One thing that hadn't been super obvious to me is that the Stick Trail, the Gulleys Trail, the Chamomile, the Chamomile Gorge Trail, and Dug Hill Road all go largely parallel to each other. I'd been thinking of the Chamomile and the Chamomile Gorge Trail as more orthogonal to the other so that if I headed directly upslope from the bottom of it, I'd get back home. But no, that always puts me in those nearly impenetrable cliffs blocking access to the Gulleys Trail a half mile south of home. So the goal this time was to backtrack homeward south of the Chamomile, avoiding those cliffs and getting back to the Gulleys Trail closer to home. In so doing, I found myself on a little shoulder in the landscape, a brief flat area before the slope turned steep again. And, to my surprise, on that shoulder I found a fair number of chanterelles freshly emerged from the forest floor. I'd assumed chanterelle season was over back at the start of August, since all the chanterelles I've ever found had appeared no later than late July. Evidently, though, there are chanterelle organisms that operate on a different schedule. I gathered all of the mushrooms I could find in the belly of my teeshirt, since I had no other way to carry them. There were enough for a moderate feast for one or sandwich components for three BLTs, which (as it happens) I would be making for my inlaws once I got back to the house. But first I had to claw my way through a black birch thicket that had formed in a series of interconnected blowdowns (and places ravaged by caterpillars) that had opened up the canopy. I arrived on the Gulleys Trail just west of a stone wall I've gradually been building where it crosses the head of a dramatic gulley.
I so sweaty and drenched in insect repellant that I had to take a shower before making those BLTs. (You don't want the fragrance of insect repellant finding its way into any food you handle — such as bagels, avocados, and tomatoes — as you make a sandwich.) I'm always a little frazzled as I make BLTs (or do any food preparation for others), since I feel a bit overwhelmed by the inevitable multitasking of toasting bagels while frying vegan bacon and onions and slicing avocados and tomatoes. I decided to sauté the chanterelles in a separate pan in case someone didn't want them in their BLT, but both Gretchen's parents opted for them.
Gretchen's father did ask if I was sure that the mushrooms were not poisonous, and I said quickly and without any particular affect that I was. Then Gretchen assured her father that I definitely know how to safely gather mushrooms. One of my recent trolling posts on NextDoor.com had been a picture of a white Amanita with the caption that the mushroom looked pretty and smelled delicious, so I was planning on making a stew when my inlaws visited, a reference to a true crime story from Australia. You can be sure that post would be entered into evidence if I somehow got my mushroom identification lethally wrong. The bagels were a success, though they contained so many ingredients that it was difficult to keep them from toppling over. Two of their ingredients were local: tomato slices from our garden and those chanterelles from the forest.
Gretchen's parents left for the Albany airport at around noon, and at the same time Gretchen left for an event in Woodstock. Months ago she'd promised NYAAF (the New York Abortion Access Fund) that she'd be tabling with a colleague at an outdoor anti-fascism musical event in Woodstock (headlined by Natalie Merchant) called Democracy Rocks. Now that the march to end animal testing is all-consuming and she has no time for other causes, she was kicking herself for agreeing to do that, but there was no way to back out of it.
This left me alone in the house with the dogs and the cats. I couldn't really leave the living room without taking Neville with me, but I didn't feel like carrying him up to the laboratory. Truth be told, I had a surprisingly bad hangover that killed my motivation and mostly had me watching YouTube videos. At some point I was inspired by a craftsman channel to revisit the big block of red oak I am slowly making into a stool. I took it outside and used a chainsaw to even up the bottom surfaces where the legs attach and then smoothed that surface down even more with that crappy Harbor Freight power planer. At some point I also took a nap.
Due to rain that arrived this afternoon, the end of Democracy Rocks was rained out, so Gretchen got to come home by 7:00pm instead of the anticipated 9:30pm. It turned out she'd actually had had a good time with her NYAFF colleague and had eaten two separate meals at the Garden Café, though the second was dessert-only.
Gretchen wanted to watch something with me on the teevee but Jeopardy! is on hiatus. So she resubscribed to Hulu and found we could watch The Devil Wears Prada 2. She asked if I wanted to watch that with her, and I said sure. It's a comedic drama revisiting the characters of the first film, but set in the present (that is, 20 years later). But nothing much has changed. Meryl Streep's character (the Prada-wearing devil) hasn't aged at all, though Streep is now 77 years old. Anne Hathaway is maybe a little older-looking, and indeed she has a slightly worse case of old lady neck than Streep! The failure of Streep to age was the most fascinating thing about the entire movie, and we found ourselves wondering if AI had been used to de-age her. Another point of note is that it is 2026 and the black friend is still treated as a magical selfless asexual being who only wants you to get the man, even if she's the one who found him.
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